Do You Know Who Supergirl Really Is?

Do You Know Who Supergirl Really Is?

She’s been Superman’s cousin, a suspected Atlantean, a shapeshifter from another dimension, and also dead.

This week Supergirl hits theaters, following up on last summer’s Superman film from James Gunn. It also reboots the live-action iteration of the character from the Supergirl TV series that ran from 2015-2021. Despite the fact that both Superman and the Supergirl show did pretty well, people seem a little unsure about this new film… probably because people have reason to be a little unsure of who Supergirl even is. Gunn’s take on Superman was pretty faithful to the details about the character that people may know from prior films, to the point where the script jumped straight into the action without rehashing his origin story. Supergirl, on the other hand, doesn’t have just one origin story to refer to. Depending on who you ask (and what decade you’re talking about), she’s had at least three. 

It’s pretty common knowledge that Superman arrived on Earth as a baby, escaping from the doomed planet of Krypton. He crash-landed in Kansas, was given the adopted name of Clark Kent, and began splitting his time between his secret identity and superhero activities once he hit adolescence. But does the new take on Supergirl have a secret identity? If so, which of the various “human names” she’s used in the past will she wear this time? That’s in part because, from the very start, Supergirl’s names, origins, and powers have been all over the place.

Supergirl first appeared in comics back in 1958, but that version of the character wasn’t truly alive, either literally or figuratively. She faded out of existence almost immediately. She was created by Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen, who wished on a magic totem for Superman to have a partner in life. This wish caused Supergirl (or as she was called then, Super-Girl) to appear out of thin air and start doing super stuff, for better or worse. Working as sort of a test run, this magical fake initially sported the classic Supergirl color scheme, but in later reprints of this appearance, she was differentiated from the “real thing” with ginger hair and a villain-coded orange and green outfit.

The very next year, Kara Zor-El, the cousin of Superman, made her comics debut, crashing down from Krypton and remaining a standard part of Superman’s supporting cast for decades. Initially, her secret identity was Linda Lee Danvers, but that wouldn’t stay true forever. During DC Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths event in 1985, which sought to reboot and unify all the different takes on DC characters over the years, the Linda Lee Danvers Supergirl sacrificed herself to save all of reality.

This was before comics adopted the habit of killing off characters and bringing them back to life within a year or so. In fact, the “Superman’s cousin” version of Supergirl actually stayed dead in comics for about 30 years, and never again used the “Linda Lee” name again. In the meantime, a new version of Supergirl would debut in the Batman/Superman animated series in the mid-’90s, where she wore both a new secret identity (Kara Kent) and a new costume (the very ’90s midriff-exposing white shirt and blue skirt).

This same outfit was later worn by a new version of Supergirl in the comics, who was named Linda (not Lee) Danvers. That’s where their similarities end, though. Created by comics legend John Byrne, this new Supergirl wasn’t even Kryptonian. She was a regular human girl. Sure, her boyfriend Buzz belonged to a demonic cult and ended up stabbing her in an attempt to turn her into a human sacrifice… but by comic book standards, that’s not actually all that strange. Her life took a turn for the superheroic when a protoplasmic shapeshifter named Matrix arrived from another dimension, gooped itself into her wounds, and fused with her, Vemon-style.

She pretended to be Supergirl during most of her comics appearances, until she was almost beaten to death by Doomsday in a 1991 story, which led her to get cold feet, not to mention a face that looked like melted silly putty. This was right before Doomsday beat Superman to (temporary) death in the famous Death of Superman comics event of 1992. Beating super-people to death was pretty much Doomsday’s only narrative purpose back then. 

That meant that Power Girl was safe from his beatings—at least at that point in comics history. First introduced in 1976, Power Girl was initially said to be the Kara Zor-El of Earth-2, meaning she was essentially Superman’s cousin from another part of the multiverse. But after the aforementioned crisis on infinite Earths, Power Girl was retconned to be the alleged granddaughter of a man from Atlantis. This meant she was more closely related to Aquaman than Superman, and therefore, was not tightly bound to Superman’s orbit. However, in 2005, a new team of writers decided that Power Girl was, in fact, Superman’s cousin from Earth-2 all along, and the whole Atlantean thing was a magically induced false memory.

It would have made sense, in a nonsensical comics sort of way, for Power Girl to become the Supergirl of the 2000’s. Almost. This logic was confounded by that fact that in 2004, the Earth-1 Kara Zor-El finally showed up again… for the first time? Making her debut in a storyline in the Superman/Batman comic series, this version of Supergirl (who would later go by the secret identity “Linda Lang”) was also Superman’s cousin. In most ways her origin worked as a modern retelling of the story of Linda Lee Danvers from decades prior. And that was OK, given that the continuity of the DC universe had already changed at least once since Linda Lee Danvers’s death in Crisis on Infinite Earths. The contradictions came from the fact that Power Girl also had almost the exact same origin story, and she was still kicking around. Suddenly, DC Comics had two Kara Zor-El’s running around with completely different personalities, costumes, and superhero names.

These versions of both Power Girl and Supergirl have stuck around ever since, despite the whole DC comics universe being rebooted at least twice in the years that followed. That can’t be said of her live-action appearances, where she was held in suspended animation inside of a dam in the 1990’s TV show Smallville, then rebooted for the Supergirl TV show, then rebooted again for the ill-fated Flash movie. All three of these live-action versions have slightly different origin stories, with different secret identities, back stories, and levels of post-traumatic stress.

And now, she’s getting rebooted again, as well as rewritten. The writer of this new Supergirl movie actually wrote an entirely different Supergirl movie that went unproduced after The Flash movie bombed. It was going to be based on that continuity’s version of Supergirl, who was actually rebooted at least one before that movie even ended (after the Flash allowed tragedy to befall him in order to save the world). This sacrifice also turned Bruce Wayne into George Clooney, who had been previously played by both Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck, again, all in the same movie.

So, you can see why people might be a little unsure of exactly who Supergirl is. Or anyone in the DC universe, really.

The good news is that there’s a lot we can already grab onto to see where this new version of the character is going. The 2026 Supergirl film is largely based on the excellent Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow limited comic series from a few years back, which explores Supergirl’s lack of certainty regarding where she belongs and what she’s fighting for. The new film will also take from some of Supergirl’s modern comic team-ups with anti-hero Lobo (now played by former Aquaman actor Jason Momoa). Like Kara, he’s also the last person to get off his planet alive, and also veers into nihilistic violence now and again (and again, and again).

For those who are only familiar with the more goody-two-shoes version of the character, it may seem like an unlikely pairing, but it’s actually right on target for what Gunn and DC are using the character to express. Where Gunn’s Superman is the DC movie universe’s idealistic moral compass, willing to accept humanity for all their flaws, Supergirl is the PTSD-masking, hard drinking, devil-may-care take on the Kryptonian immigrant story.

Unlike her 1958 debut, which asked, “What if Superman had a super-girlfriend?’, this new film will ask, “What if Superman was a woman who watched her entire planet die, including her loving parents, before being dropped on Earth with just her dog?”  In our modern, horror-loving society, it could be that a lot of people will have an easier time relating to Supergirl than to her boy scout cousin, though they’ll have to be willing to put aside their initial lack of certainty of who she even is to find out for themselves.